1. Field
This disclosure relates generally to the field of wireless communications and more specifically to the systems and methods for measuring and reducing latency of radio link flows having different quality of service (QoS) reservations.
2. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, multimedia and other. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple mobile devices by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) including WCDMA, HSPA and HSUPA, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, and other types of wireless communication systems.
High Data Rate (HDR) is a mobile wireless access technology developed by Qualcomm that provides support for personal broadband Internet services, such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), IP-TV, packet switched video telephony (PSVT), multimedia streaming, Web browsing and other services, on CDMA2000 (1xEV-DO), 3GPP and other wireless communication systems. One advantage of the HDR protocol is that is provides quality of service (QoS) resource reservation control mechanisms. Quality of service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. For example, one or more of a required bit rate, delay, jitter, packet dropping probability or bit error rate may be guaranteed.
Many applications that require QoS control are sensitive to round-trip latency and must preserve strict inter-packet and intra-flow timing characteristics. Examples of such time-sensitive applications include streaming voice and video conferencing. Therefore, measurement of round-trip delay for these applications may be used to determine if the wireless communication system provides the quality of service requested by these applications. Historically, ICMP ping commands were used for measuring network delays. However, HDR systems typically do not support the ICMP protocol and do not provide any other mechanism for measuring latency on radio links. Accordingly, there is a need for a mechanism for measuring delays on QoS radio links of wireless communication systems.